Bollybollybollywood

I've been watching a bunch of Hindi movies lately. I discovered the secret cache that the library has. :) Hee hee.

But I think I'm at the point where so many is too many. All the plot lines are running together in my brain and I don't know which movie was which now. I also dreamed in Hindi the other night, which is mostly weird because I don't actually speak it--but in the dream I was speaking and understanding it fluently. In my dream we were living in India, with our son who was about seven or eight. When I woke up, I was like, hey! Where were all our other kids?! and Oh my gosh, I speak Hindi!

Seriously, though, watching so many Hindi movies is like watching Top Gun, followed by Mission Impossible, then War of the Worlds, and Vanilla Sky in a period of 24 hours (that's to make up for it being a different language). Oh, and all the movies are between 3 and 4 hours long, and about every third scene is a song with a kazillion extras. They've all got Tom Cruise, and now all the plot lines are blurring in your brain and it's a bit confusing. No, not all Bollywood stars look the same, but the last several movies I picked up all starred Shah Rukh Khan, so it's a jumble.

I am recognizing more and more Hindi words. Can't write or read them, but I recognize basic question words, 'kuchna'/'kuchne' which means nothing, 'dil' which is heart, the word for girl which I can't even attempt to write, father, mother, son, and a few others. I can recognize various Hindu festivals as well--Diwale, Holi, Lodi. Someday I'd like to learn Hindi, especially if I'm ever in India agian for any amount of time.

The coolest part of this is the last movie I watched (Baghban) had a reference to the Ramayana (part of the Hindu sacred writings)--a party guest calls the father's sons by the names of the four sons of the king in the Ramayana, and I recognized the names (I can't repeat them, but I knew right away what he was talking about). That was cool. It was like being second-language English and recognizing a quote from Shakespeare. Or so I liken it. I guess that ancient world literature classa t uni wasn't entirely useless. Just kidding, I learned a lot from that course and loved it, just not the harping so much on what Hindus believe and why it's such a nice religion, because I was the only person in the class who had seen an entire society based on Hinduism and it's just aweful for women and the lower castes--which is essentially everyone. Not meant to be a tirade.

So if you're interested in any good Hindi movies, the flixster thingy on the sidebar below the archives has reviews of several I've seen lately. And if you want to be my flixster friend online and share movie reviews with me, here's that link: Movies to Review

Hasta luego.....